As they have negotiated colonization, state-sanctioned starvation, uprisings, large scale emigration, independence, partition, membership in the EU, an economic boom and then bust, Irish writers have put language, including language experimentation, and memory at the center. Four Irish writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and recently a generation of women writers have risen to prominence. Readings will draw from Irish Literary Revival writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett to contemporary writers such as Seamus Heaney, Sally Rooney, Eavan Boland, Roddy Doyle, Edna O'Brien, Anna Burns, and Eimar McBride. We will also watch Irish films and attend events around the city. Together, through readings, writings, and class discussion, we will consider how a land, a people, a country, a nation (and a diaspora) are created and contested through literature. As novelist Anne Enright explains, "Ireland is a series of stories it tells itself. None of them are true."